Absolutely fantastic quality, with an equally well made ending. I especially love the fact that I can show this to anyone with any knowledge of the portal universe, without actually having to spoil anything or go into detail.

The narration given by the environment only really is a fantastic piece of work, and suits the tone perfectly.

I guess I meant to say the tone of the film, not the Portal universe. It just ties everything (the single character, the bleak state of the room, the soundtrack, the constant exercise, the surveillance shots, ect.) together in the film by really emphasizing the loneliness and lack of hope.

EDIT: The only fault I’ve only now seen (after inspecting the surveillance footage thoroughly to see how long it took her) is that the footage is extremely garbled. We can see the days counter go up to 15 at one point, yet in a following scene we see 14, then even 8 after that. It is either an error (likely), or left in for a reason I can’t begin to guess.

@Tusque D’Ivoire, I agree to a point. There were many, many subjects and probably many different iterations of tests. I think this short would be perfectly fitting and ‘viable’, but, yes, not with the specific storylines that are in the two games. :)

I don’t know. I think Portal is pretty damn gloomy if you stop and think about it. The humour in the game undercuts that quite a bit but I think we’re able to appreciate the humour because we’re not actually the ones trapped by an insane computer who has killed everyone else, with no idea if there’s anywhere left to escape to, and even when we think we’ve got out we’re dragged back to go through the whole thing over again.

@Tusque D’Ivoire – I’m with you. This is a very good movie and I enjoyed it (especially the end!) but it’s not Portal, it just uses Portal art with the gritty factor turned up to 11. Portal is gloomy for sure and vaguely depressing, but this kind of grit isn’t really hinted at; Portal’s world is a cold, clinical, borderline-sterile environment which hints at a more sinister purpose that runs opposite to the appearance of the facility at large (high tech, scientific, bettering humanity). The “grit” seen here in this movie is mostly seen in the maintenance areas of Portal, or when the facility has completely crumbled, not in testing or living conditions. It’s fairly out of place.

I believe it’s only miliseconds as the smallest denomination in the first surveillance footage, the section at 2:03 has to be in seconds, you can clearly see that small events (such as throwing the tray) are not fully shown, just cut.

The only reason I’m nitpicking this in the first place is that A) pet peeve and B) it’s such a fantastic film to begin with that it’s easy to see areas where it lacked that same quality.

More like, some variety of exercise was in order, not just two kinds interchanged 10 times.

Also, i dont think it really works very well, with human guards and all…even if they were supposed to never actually catch her – she just moves too slow. Of course real people cant do a 180 turn and shoot in 1/10th of a second, but that just means there had to be a bit longer pre-production phase.

She was looking at the writing on the wall with a fairly distinct look of accomplishment on her face before she went to get the portal gun. I would say it’s logical that the writing was a code explaining how to obtain the gun and she had just figured out what it was saying.

I would say a bigger problem is the context for which the portal fling was used. Portal fling is something you would want to experiment with first and there were far safer ways across that gap like simply firing a portal across it. Though I appreciate that portal fling would be more entertaining of course.

The film was quite good, however the music was terrible – intrusive and inappropriate at all times. The person who wrote and coordinated the music for this short does not understand the use of music in films. With a different soundtrack this could have been perfect.

I know it is common to pretend to be an expert on every subject on the internet, but I seriously doubt you’re such an expert at film scoring that you can pass such sweeping judgement.

While that short may have had a few issues with the music’s editing in my opinion (speaking as a amateur musician – it was slightly off beat compared to the visuals at a few points) overall it was a good enough fit and didn’t in any way detract from the mood.

You might disagree with the style of music, but that is a matter of taste – what would you prefer sweeping string heavy orchestral score?

It’s not terrible but it is highly derivative of Trent Reznor’s stuff. Of course often that’s exactly how a director will ask for music: “make it sound like composer x” (where x is normally Hans Zimmer).

That said it didn’t remind me of Trent Reznor, but another composer who I can’t recall right now and it is bugging me.

I was thinking John Murphy, but it’s not him…

Still there are quite a few films and composers that do that heavy piano bass rock and synth sound, so yeah it is pretty derivative, but derivative isn’t always bad – some of the best songs and soundtracks in history are highly derivative.

This is a really slick piece of work, but the story needs a kick up the bum & it sorely needs a bit of humour. Too many fan films are excuses to test out FX, but i guess that’s what they’re for in a way.

Top marks for production value though. I’m a filmmaker myself & realise how hard it can be to put even the simplest production together.

And yeah, the actress was great in it. I just would have liked to have seen a comedic foil to her seriousness.

Alright, maybe i forgot to add the disclaimer ‘IN MY OWN PERSONAL OPINION:’ before my comment. I appreciate that a lot of people really dig it & rightfully so. I just feel that it could’ve been better with a bit more characterisation. And the humour in Portal is way more than just fat jokes anyway – both games are full of jokes & quirks from start to finish. This seemed empty in that respect & i thought it was a bit of a shame, considering they’d got so much else so right.

@Binary77 But it DID have characterization. It characterized the protagonist, sure, but even more it characterized the setting. Just because it didn’t have speaking doesn’t mean that it wasn’t fleshed out. The emptiness is the point of the film, it’s a bleak take on the Half life universe.

Since I’m a lazy boy I’ll just copypaste what I wrote in the other thread:

Well the game itself is awesome, but damn that’s some heavy consolitis. No AA, no quicksave, no mouse cursor in the menu if a 360 controller is plugged in (had to deactivate it from the options to make the cursor appear), no changing graphical settings ingame, no changing THE FRIGGIN’ CONTROLS ingame! Also all the settings (graphics, controls, everything) resets when you exit the game. I sincerely hope that these things are artifacts of the demo being the console demo with just the barest minimum of porting done because man, that is some embarrasing stuff.

Again, the game is good fun, but it spits in the face of PC gaming. (Though it plays excellently with mouse and keyboard, barring a few uncomfortable movements for the left little finger.)

He’s absolutely right. This portal mod or whatever it is doesn’t let you change settings, customize controls–it doesn’t even support mouselook–it has no quicksave, and I finished the whole thing in less than an hour.

In fact, it’s basically one long cutscene with no intereactivity whatsoever.

The original Portal is one of the gloomiest games I can think of. Sure, there’s black humour, but the humour itself is still pretty grim to go with the creepy ambience of the abandoned Aperture complex (this really hits when the turrets are first introduced, which is also when you first discover some parts of the facility beyond the sterile test chambers). As much as I love Portal 2 I think it lost some of that as its overall tone is more overtly comedic.

Interesting to hear you say that. While the bits of Portal 2 involving Wheatley tended towards the more overtly comedic, I thought that the second act was by far the grimmest bit of the series, as it’s only then that you realize how huge and twisted and insane Aperture really is. Looking up at all those testing pods never fails to unsettle me. Certainly Cave Johnson’s voiceovers defuse the tension, but it’s still pretty dark.

Anyway, with regards to the film, I could have done with fewer push-up shots, but that ending was awesome. I assumed that those soldiers were supposed to be Combine at first (not entirely sure now), and the general tone seems to match more closely to Half-Life in any case.

With regard to the gloomy: Yeah, Portal 1 (and 2) were pretty gloomy. But they also were light-hearted.

The best way to think of it would be to take Cave Johnson’s rant about Lemons from Portal 2. With JK Simmons saying it, it is an emotional, but entertaining, rant. It gives a good insight into the character, it is pretty depressing, but it makes you smile.

Now imagine if they had someone else as the voice actor. Someone who wanted to give a really deep and dramatic reading. Suddenly, you are no longer smiling. It is just depressing.

That being said, I liked the short, even if way too long was spent on the exercise montage.

Pretty stupid tactical use of portals. She should be putting portals under the feet of the guards and dumping them somewhere, not doing that risky kick-a-bed-through-a-portal onto his head (that was very cool, but what if she hadn’t kicked it quite hard enough to go through?) and definitely not portaling herself *closer* to a guard and taking him out by hand.

Yeah can’t say I’m crazy about this one. Around the traps of short digital films those riffs and look effects are really played, if you ask me. A wider audience probably won’t see it that way though. Portal done Matrix/Oldboy grim-dark doesn’t sit with me very well either. Portal is all about that sort of Milgram experiment ‘banality of evil’ black humour. Doing that well requires great writing and acting though and that’s not always available.

It really wasn’t that bad; however, I think we’re all making the assumption that it’s supposed to be a Portal-only fan film. See, the tone really seems to be more appropriate for the Half-Life 2 universe, doesn’t it? Did anyone else find the “guards” pretty similar to the HL2 Combine we all know and hate? If so, perhaps the Combine has taken over the Enrichment Center Testing concept after finding the Borealis and it’s mysterious cargo? Just a few thoughts for the radical disparity in tone.

Oh, and the Portal Gun was hidden behind the panel with the scratches on it. She looked at it funny, and realized that it was moveable. Yeah, really awkward and “convinient”.

Good grief. This is exceptionally good and yet I read the comments here and it’s like reading the comments on YouTube. Would people seriously have enjoyed it more if it had been a live-action walkthrough?